Case Studies

BWCE is an early pioneer of community-owned energy generation. The group is volunteer led, with two paid staff members, and it has 18 sub-100kW solar arrays (totalling 472kW), five ground-mounted solar arrays (totalling 11.84MW), and 13.5kW of hydro. BWCE’s assets generate sufficient electricity over a whole year to power 4,000 typical homes in the area.

Exeter Community Energy is an established community energy group serving the Exeter area. It is volunteer led, with many local professionals giving their time. The group has been instrumental in the provision of 209 kW of solar PV on the roofs of Local Authority and local business properties and it is in the early stages of developing a hydro scheme in the city.

Marshfield is a village of around 850 households in South Gloucestershire. Marshfield Energy Group is volunteer-led, with support from the Community Land Trust. The local primary school has a 12 kW wind turbine and there are 30 domestic PV installations ranging between 3-4 kW each. The community group has undertaken research in the past, exploring the potential for a solar farm, wind, and anaerobic digester generation schemes.

Owen Square Community Energy initiative is a member-based local energy supply company jointly operated by Easton Community Centre (ECC), local energy group Easton Energy Group (EEG) and Bristol-based microgrid developer Clean Energy Prospector (CEPRO). The Owen Square Community Energy initiative, which began in 2014, is tackling the challenge of how to develop a replicable business case for intensive low carbon retrofits of homes. It includes plans to establish a ‘community microgrid’, incorporating a local supply company, community scale thermal storage, domestic heat pumps and solar PV, and to explore the potential economic gains from energy markets and grid services.

Rooftop Housing Group is a Housing Association serving the West Midlands and Gloucestershire. The organisation has a full-time sustainability officer and a regional manager who is very supportive of innovative projects that promote energy efficiency.

Tamar Energy Community is a Devon-based community energy group with 327 kW of solar PV on schools, businesses and the local swimming pool. The group is volunteer-led, and it runs a fuel poverty and domestic energy advice service.

Trial location Various Locations Background Due to technological and societal changes there is growing pressure to develop new electricity market processes. The emergence of both smart meters and smart contract platforms provides opportunities for regulators such as Ofgem to redefine roles and responsibilities. In particular, systems can be created to implement incentive structures based on […]

Egnida is managing an innovative scheme to introduce smart energy technology into social housing. The ‘smart energy fuel poverty initiative’ is an existing project, which is a test bed of real homes acting under real conditions. Six homes are currently configured with technology including solar PV, battery storage and smart heating systems.

The OpenLV project is deploying the LV-CAP™ software platform in a number of distribution substations to make low voltage network data more widely accessible. LV-CAP™ is an open and flexible platform, designed to easily connect to any measurement device. Haysys has developed the FeederNet system, a complete low voltage substation monitoring solution, which measures a wide range of electrical parameters of interest. FeederNet has been designed to be compact, easy to install and weather proof, so is suitable for most substations.

Given the unpredictability and high variability of solar photovoltaic and electric vehicles, low voltage (LV) networks will quickly become saturated. However, congestion will concentrate around particular substations or feeders, leading to increased energy losses, overheating of key assets and power cuts.